Incean Renaissance
The '''Incean Renaissance '''was a cultural, artistic, and political movement within the Incean community of Sednyana, beginning around 1910 and extending into the following decades. While Sednyana's Incean community had for centuries experienced gradual and forced assimilation into Sednyanese society, particularly through migrations to southern and coastal urban centers during the industrial revolution, the Incean Renaissance is often seen as a "reawakening" of Incean cultural traditions, including a revitalization of the Incean language (whose number of speakers more than doubled as a percent of the country's population between 1910 and 1940), syncretism of Incean traditions with the Cåoist and other faiths in the Astyi religion, and a move back to the Incean states of Jenet, Matreena, and Akariya. It was also a period of enormous artistic and literary production and innovation within the Incean community, and produced many of Sednyana's greatest artists and novelists, among them the painter Ngedyen Taruf, author Yann Daniel Afa, and poet Yinnasa. Politically, the movement was associated with leftist politics, including socialism and an awakening of environmentalism; the Green party has its roots in the Incean Renaissance. While the movement was largely contained to the Incean community until around 1940, many of the themes and ideas of the Renaissance moved into the Sednyanese cultural mainstream after the Ukari War, during the period known as the Cultural Revolution. Beginnings Several different events came together to lead to the start of the Incean Renaissance. The first were political considerations around the use of the Incean language, particular as the ruling Conservative Party government under J. Stanley Goddard sought to remove Incean as an official language of Sednyana. Initially seeking a constitutional amendment in 1898, this motion failed, generating only 58% (out of the total required 66%) of the vote in the Senate; the governing party therefore sought in the early '00s to remove it using the argument that Incean was a ''de facto ''dead language. This argument, championed by senator Eliever Schatz and historian Jerome Bells, claimed that even though a wide spattering of dialects descended from Incean continued to be spoken at home throughout the country, these languages were not written and there existed no genuine, unified, literary language of Incean to serve as an official language. Several activist groups immediately took up against this cause, although there existing no party that had unified support against it. They identified as their champion the Fern Grove linguist and scholar of classical Incean literature Samuel Ngedyen Nyoko. Fluent in Classical Incean and heavily informed about its history, Ngedyen arrived at the hearing in Kia Boya along with some two dozen Incean men and women drawn from a variety of communities, whom he had sit in the balcony and instructed to speak loudly in their native languages. After giving a long presentation on the language's history and current use, including lengthy quotes from several different pieces of classical Incean literature, Ngedyen famously finished his speech with nearly five minutes of impassioned Classical Incean, after which the Incean gallery members broke out in tears and a standing ovation. The presiding judge ruled that it was unequivocal from Ngedyen's testimony and the audience's reaction that the Incean language was both classical and literary and continued to be spoken, understood, and to give meaning to the lives of Sednyanese citizens. Famously, nearly all of the Inceans present would later confess that they barely understood Ngedyen's Classical Incean speech, but merely broke into tears and applause at the opportunity to hear the sounds of their culture brought into the halls of a government that they felt was distant. Having struck down the opposition to Incean as an official language, Ngedyen became famous, and decided to get more involved in politics. In 1909, he joined with lawyer Yancey Straights against the law that all Sednyanese schools had to be taught primarily in English; the 1910 court case Yahini v. Board of Education determined that, constitutionally, it was valid for government-funded schools to be operated in any language. The next year, Nyuya v. Schorollman established that Sednyanese Incean students had a right to learn Incean - as one of the country's national languages - and therefore all publicly funded high schools with interested students must offer classes teaching students the Incean language. Under the new Liberalist government of Andrew Thomas Cassidy, secretary of education Benson Strong launched a new program to create a general program for Incean language classes across the country, which had not previously existed. However, Strong soon came across the dilemma that few could agree on what language should be taught across Sednyana as "Incean," as few could agree on the rules of a unified Incean language. That year, following the national events, the first ever Conference on the Incean Language was organized at Fern Grove by Ngedyen Nyoko and fellow Incean language scholar William Yiyima. After a long series of meetings, the attendees agreed to begin a project to create a standardized register of the Incean language, to be called Modern Standard Incean (MSI), which could be taught in schools and recognized widely as a set of easily interpreted rules. Ngedyen and Yiyima were the heads of these project; however, many others who would become important figures in the Renaissance were also involved, including then-undergraduate Daniel Afa and Bidi Tedyakima.